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Judy Huth met Bill Cosby when she was a teenager, she reports in court filings. It was the mid 1970’s and Mr. Cosby had already had his breakthrough on the TV series I Spy and was becoming a movie star, but was still years away from his big hit on The Cosby Show. Ms. Huth and a friend spotted him on a movie set in a park in San Marino, California, and eventually met him in person, according to their court records.
Days later, she claims in the filing, she went to Mr. Cosby’s tennis club at his invitation, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where she accused him of forcing her to perform having sex with him in a bedroom. Mr Cosby has called her account a fake since the case was first filed in 2014.
This week, a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court will decide who is credible as Mr. Cosby’s civil trial over Ms. Huth’s allegations of sexual assault is set to begin.
Ms. Huth’s memory of the time of the encounter has changed. She initially said it happened in 1974 when she was 15 years old. More recently, however, she concluded that it was actually 1975 when she was 16, according to court records. From the start, she said in court filings that she recalled Mr Cosby telling her and her friend to claim they were both 19 if asked at the villa.
The change in dates has prompted Mr Cosby’s team to further challenge their account. Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr Cosby, said in a statement that Ms Huth “has made conflicting statements against Mr Cosby since the beginning of this civil lawsuit”. Ms Huth said recently released information provided by Mr Cosby’s team had caused her to reconsider what year it happened.
The civil case, one of the last unresolved lawsuits against Mr. Cosby, has been largely stayed while Pennsylvania prosecutors pursued the criminal case that led to his 2018 conviction on drug abuse and sexual assault charges against Andrea Constand. But the conviction was overturned and Mr Cosby was released from prison last year when an appeals panel found that his due process rights had been violated when prosecutors ignored a previous district attorney’s assurance that Mr Cosby would not be prosecuted.
With the criminal case overturned, the importance of Ms Huth’s lawsuit has risen in the minds of some of the many women who have accused Mr Cosby of being a sexual predator.
“I think that Judy’s trial could be our last stand for justice and that our accountability comes through in our opposition to Bill Cosby,” said Victoria Valentino, who says Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in Los Angeles in 1969 , in a text. (Mr Cosby has denied all sexual assault allegations and said all encounters were consensual.) She said she plans to attend part of the trial, which, barring a last-minute agreement, will begin with jury selection this week scheduled to begin and opening arguments expected on June 1st.
Patricia Steuer, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said she saw the Huth civil trial as an opportunity to seek some measure of justice. “Right now there’s no other option,” she said. “It’s probably the only way.”
Mr Cosby, now 84, has already faced several other civil lawsuits filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation, after his legal team dismissed their allegations of sexual misconduct as fiction. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements being settled by Mr Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.
Ms. Huth’s lawsuit is poised to become the first civil lawsuit alleging Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to go to trial. In court documents, Ms. Huth says that in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to pet him.
Ms Huth filed her lawsuit in December 2014, at a time when Mr Cosby was facing allegations from many women who said he drugged and sexually assaulted them in incidents spanning several decades.
She also reported her allegation to the police, but the Los Angeles County Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had expired.
Her attorneys argued that the civil suit has not yet expired because it is being extended in California for adults who say they were victims of sexual abuse when they were minors but have repressed the experience. The time limit for filing such a lawsuit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effects of the abuse, her attorneys said.
In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault lawsuits in civil courts.
Ms Huth’s revised timeline, which says Mr Cosby assaulted her when she was 16 instead of 15, should not affect her ability to pursue the lawsuit, as the law considers a 16-year-old a minor, Ms Huth’s lawyer Gloria Allred said.
Mr Cosby’s lawyers argued in legal documents that they felt ambushed by the sudden change in Ms Huth’s account. They said their investigation was aimed at establishing the whereabouts of Mr. Cosby and Ms. Huth in 1974 and said they had prepared evidence to show that the entertainer was dead during the period in the year she suggested Wasn’t at the Playboy Mansion in 1974.
According to Mr. Cosby’s attorneys, the Playboy Mansion logs for 1974 do not list either Mrs. Huth or her friend as a visitor.
At a hearing last week, the judge asked Playboy to produce records for 1975 and agreed that Ms Huth and the friend who was accompanying her should testify further before the trial began.
Mr Cosby’s lawyers have also questioned whether she had recalled the alleged abuse just shortly before filing the lawsuit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years ago.
Mr Wyatt, Mr Cosby’s spokesman, said in the statement: “We are confident that the Playboy records, along with Ms Huth changing her timeline of events from 1974 to 1975 at the 11th hour, will vindicate Mr Cosby. “
Mr Cosby confirmed meeting Ms Huth at the Playboy Mansion and Ms Huth has provided photos of them together which she said were taken there, according to court documents. But he has denied that she was underage when they met.
“While the defendant does not deny that he socialized with the plaintiff at the Playboy Mansion as he did with other women and men who frequented the club,” his attorneys said in court filings, “the defendant vehemently denies that the plaintiff was a minor.”
Ms Huth has said that she has changed the timeline of her account in part because she only recently discovered that filming was taking place for the film Let’s Do It Again, based on documents provided by Mr Cosby, in which she says she met, took place later than she remembered.
The trial is expected to take two weeks and Ms Huth, who is seeking damages from Mr Cosby, is expected to testify along with the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy mansion. Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify. He will not be present at the trial, Mr Wyatt said.
During the pre-trial hearings, Ms Huth had requested a bench trial, but the trial will be before a 12-person jury, with a minimum of 9 votes out of 12 required for a conviction.
Mr. Cosby settled a civil suit brought against him by Ms. Constand in 2006 for $3.4 million. The other civil matters were settled by the insurance of Mr. Cosby’s home insurance on undisclosed terms, which covered “personal injury” in a number of circumstances, including court cases in which the policyholder was accused of defamation.
The other ongoing civil case against Mr Cosby was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actress and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at an Atlantic City hotel in 1990 when she was 26. She was able to file the lawsuit, which is still in its early stages because New Jersey revised its statute of limitations on sexual assault cases in 2019, extending the deadline for filing lawsuits and creating a special two-year window for people to bring cases regardless of how long ago the alleged assaults occurred.